Malls Malls Everywhere, Let's All Have A Shop!

February 9, 2009

This is entry number three, coming to you on day number four of the ONLY IN AMERICA series brought to you in part by iamtedking on my new and still totally rad MacBook computer. I will readily admit that I’m worked from this daily blogging business! I honestly have no idea how someone like BSNYC can come up with really lengthy daily blogs that feature wit and hilarity in equal doses as fixed gears and neon. How he does it is beyond me. I’m quite sure that he’s BSsNYC, where the S stands for pluralized Snobssssssssssssss. It’s either that or it comes down to his mastery of sorcery and magic whereby he freezes time as well as holds cycling comedians honstage thereby he writes at length. Obviously it’s one of those two.

It’s late. In fact, as I type these words, I have only 33 minutes before it’s tomorrow, at which point I will have again failed to have delivered a daily O.I.A. blog post. With this constraint, I will be brief and to the point.

Today’s ONLY IN AMERICA struck me on today’s crummy weather day off. Given this free time, we went shopping. This is a fairly exciting endeavor for my Euro and south Pacific comrades because it allows them to take advantage of a) America’s tanking economy and therefore jawdropping sales b) the favorable exchange rate of Euro:dollar and lastly c) the close proximity in which soooo many things can be found soooo close together. Cutting straight to the chase, today’s ONLY IN AMERICA is

Ridiculously enormous shopping malls!

In fact, here is one aerial shot of a nameless LA shopping mall that is so gosh darn large, it cannot fit into the frame of this blog! (Much like THIS flag.) Today we visited an outdoor outlet mall in the thriving metropolis of Camarillo – which is a fun town name to pronounce if you really get your Spanish on and roll your Rs. Although I think you may be scolded for that since there is actually just one R and you therefore don’t really roll them as much as you would for the dub-Rs. Oh well.

This mall ran counter intuitive to everything I see in most American malls today. For starters, it was outdoors. Sure sure, lots of outlet malls take this form, but this seemed different right off the bat since it was assembled in about 6 different buildings on opposite sides of a fairly busy street. The counter-intuition comes to play because the true American way is to make things as easy as possible so that the typical indolent American can buy the most stuff possible in as fewest steps possible. A one building, indoor, escalator clad mall is the way to shop til you drop in America! In any event, we had about 90 minutes to puruse entirely too many stores, so after walking around half of the complex, I was bored silly but happened to run into Thor who had a similar notion and we spent the next 45 minutes looking for a Starbucks*. Oh, this is another counter intuition, because we were in an area that is overwhelmed with modern industry, but despite the fact that there were at least seven Starbucks in Camarrrrrrrrrillo, we couldn’t find a single one in this mayhem. Crud.

Well, that’s the abrupt ending we’ll finish with today, because I’m down to 9 minutes to finish this daily blog update and my eyes are shutting entirely too long and too often to make computing healthy.

Goodnight and good luck.

*Yes yes, quit your complaining, just like you I’d rather visit the local coffee shop, but there were none to be found, so I figured I would at least be able to drink the well standardized Starbucks Pike Place beverage or perhaps even a small, low water, Americano. Yet neither would be going down on this occasion.